Jimmie Higgins eBook

And next morning at the shop, more excitement!
It was four years now that Jimmie had been in the
employ of old man Granitch, and in all that time he
had done but one thing; standing in a vast room amid
a confusion of whirling belts and wheels, a roar and
screech and grumble and whirl that completely annulled
one of the five senses. There came in front of
him, mechanically propelled, a tray full of small
oblong blocks of steel, which he fed, one with each
hand, into two places in a machine; the machine took
these blocks, and rounded off one end, and ground
the rest a little smaller, and put a thread on it,
and it dropped into a tray on the other side, a bolt.
Because Jimmie had to watch the machine, and keep
the oil-cups full, his was classed as semi-skilled
labour, and was paid nineteen and a half cents an
hour. Some time ago an expert had studied the
process, and figured that with labour at that price
it was one-eighth of a cent per hour cheaper to have
the work done by hand than to instal a machine to
do it; and so for four years Jimmie had his job, standing
on one spot from seven to twelve, and again from twelve-thirty
to six, and carrying home every Saturday night the
sum of twelve dollars and twenty-nine cents.
You might have thought that the huge machine-works
would have made it twelve-thirty for good measure;
but if so, you do not understand large scale production.

And now, all of an instant and without warning, Jimmie’s
precisely ordered and habitual world came to an end.
He was at his post when the whistle blew, but the
machinery did not move. And presently came the
Irish foreman with the curt announcement that the machinery
would never move again, at least not on that spot;
it was to be cleared out of the way, and new machinery
set up, and they were to fall to forthwith with wrenches
and hammers and crow-bars to make a new world!

So for a week they did; and meantime, every night
as he went home, Jimmie saw people’s homes being
wrecked—­roofs falling in clouds of dust,
and gangs of men loading the debris into huge motor-trucks.
Before long they had got acetylene torches, and were
working all night-gangs of labourers who lived in
tents on vacant lots outside the city and kept their
canvas cots warm with double shifts of sleepers.
Jimmie Higgins realized the dreadful truth, that in
spite of all the agitation of Socialists, the war
had actually come to Leesville!

CHAPTER IV

JIMMIE HIGGINS STRIKES IT RICH

I

It was some time before Jimmie understood the nature
of the new machinery he was helping to set up.
It was nobody’s business to explain, for he
was only a pair of hands and a strong back; he was
not supposed to be a brain—­while as for
a soul or a conscience, nobody was supposed to be
that. Russian agents had come to Leesville with
seventeen millions of the money which the Paris bankers
had put up; and so overnight whole blocks of homes
were swept out of existence, and a huge new steel
structure was rising, and on the spot where for four
years Jimmie had made certain motions of the hands,
they were preparing to manufacture new machinery for
the quantity production of shell-casings.